Culture Awards

Theater

The Year of (Good) Timely Plays

Most nights, the quickest means of escaping the news is a theater: The lights go down, the curtain goes up, and the 21st century disappears. Who can resist being diverted by characters so happily unaware of the social and cultural tempests raging on the other side of the theater wall? And when playwrights do try to confront the contemporary world, they tend to philosophize or offer pat solutions, stranding us in the tedious world of the Issue Play. But this year, a striking number of fine writers successfully grappled with those tempests onstage. They dragged New York theater into the present.

No show did this better than Doubt. John Patrick Shanley’s Broadway triumph concerned a woman who refuses to compromise, or even acknowledge uncertainty, a depressingly common feature of American public life just now. (Not coincidentally, he started writing it shortly after the Iraq invasion.) Rinne Groff’s The Ruby Sunrise beautifully conveyed the chastened idealism of Generations X and Y, and the Presnyakov brothers’ Terrorism captured the particular dread that political violence inflicts on us at the moment. At the Lincoln Center Festival, Ariane Mnouchkine’s seven-hour Le Dernier Caravansérail offered an absorbing (if long-winded) view of the global refugee crisis.

Sometimes being current isn’t just a function of picking a timely theme—it’s a question of sensibility. In his radio play Hope Leaves the Theater, Charlie Kaufman writes about a woman who’s lonely amid all her gadgetry, hardly a novel subject for audiences who must be reminded at the start of every performance to hush their cell phones. But his surprising narrative leaps and clever metatheatrics made the material seem fresh, captivating the audience anew. Michael John LaChiusa’s See What I Wanna See, which tells the story of a priest who lost his faith after 9/11, was one of the rare musicals that tried to address the way we live now. Far more often, this year’s musicals seemed disconnected from contemporary sounds and concerns. There’s a place for nostalgia and escapism on Broadway, of course, and the musical is often the place for it. But what Shanley, Kaufman, and LaChiusa showed us in 2005 is that the best plays delight their audiences precisely by refusing to escape their time.
— J.M.

The Industry Award

Scott Elliott, The New Group
The New Group does many things well: Choosing plays isn’t one of them. This year, the city was hardly crying out for another revival of Hurlyburly, David Rabe’s overlong examination of Hollywood debauchery, or Abigail’s Party, Mike Leigh’s middling satire about British suburbia. But in the hands of artistic director Scott Elliott, those scripts (along with the New York premiere of the Presnyakov brothers’ bleak, unnerving Terrorism) formed the basis of a remarkably accomplished year. Though Elliott directed the Rabe and Leigh plays, he merits the award for his producing, for managing the season in its totality. The shows weren’t high-concept exercises, radical rediscoveries, or star vehicles (per se). The productions served the plays, thanks in large part to the exceptionally fine talent assembled to stage them. Elliott began with stars who can actually act, such as Ethan Hawke, who was magnetically watchable as a self-destructive talent agent in Hurlyburly; and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who showed a wonderfully odd charisma as an undersexed hostess from hell in Abigail’s Party. He surrounded them with first-rate stage pros (Lisa Emery, Elizabeth Marvel, Josh Hamilton), and added a brilliant discovery or two (Darren Goldstein, Elizabeth Jasicki). It all snapped together to form a coherent, compelling body of work, the most consistently rewarding of any in New York this year.